On my bike

Someone sneered at my bike yesterday. It was Steve Hellier. He was lounging around outside Bush House, by the crossing, and I stopped in front of him because the lights were red. He looked down at my bike with a mocking laugh and said, “That’s a blast from the past!”

“I got it for my eighteenth birthday,” I said.

My Mum actually drove me up to the Brixton Cycles co-operative to choose it. I lived in Surrey at the time and to my delight as we drove into Brixton a mob was hanging Thatcher in effigy from a tree outside the Ritzy cinema. I particularly wanted to get my bike from the co-op because I knew a couple of the people involved in setting it up and I was sure they wouldn’t sell me a dodo. After we’d talked through what kind of cyclist I wanted to be they suggested a Holdsworth Claud Butler tourer with a Reynolds 531 alloy frame, made in Birmingham. The only problem was the colour; like a child I wanted it to be red but all they had was a very uncool turquoise. It was also a bit more expensive than my Mum had budgeted for, but she could tell it was a great bike and so could I, so we bought it despite the uncool 70′s styling.

“It looks like it,” Steve said with a curl of his lip, “Doesn’t it belong in a museum?” ”Curses,” I thought to myself, “should have seen that coming.” Luckily the lights changed and I rode away before he could pour further scorn on me.

I love my bike and I’ve had it so long it really seems like a part of my body when I’m riding but it also has a life of its own, springing forward with energy and enthusiasm when I get on to it. It is so efficient and well-designed that I sometimes overtake people on mountain bikes as I free-wheel downhill.

It is this fantastic efficiency that I love about bikes and also what I find depressing about cycling when it’s perverted by sport. The great thing about a bike is that you can spring onto it and immediately go where you want to, with no mucking about. So why do people feel the need to get up in fancy dress when they’re riding? It’s the influence of things like the Tour De France, I tell you. It’s not healthy. That’s why Steve thinks a bike needs to be new to be good. Bikes become like mobile phones, people start to think their bike says who they are: Am I a Californian downhiller, am I an aesthetic pursuit rider, am I wearing my yellow sweater, is my helmet cool yet?

Come on cyclists, we’re better than this. We don’t need daft Lycra outfits to ride in, and our machines are easily efficient enough to carry some baggage without slowing us down. We can ride everywhere, the more we do it the easier it will be. Don’t kid yourselves by buying a mountain bike if you live in the city, that’s like those idiots in the SUVs, get a bike that will take you where you need to go. Most of all, don’t let the pernicious influence of sport turn cycling into a marketing opportunity for the capitalists. Bikes are cheap, they don’t need accessories, they perform best when you are happy and you don’t need any help from The Man to do that.